Multipath fading involves the dynamic reduction of the signal level of a radio communication signal at specific locations due to the combining of incoming signals that travel multiple, alternative paths. Multipath fading occurs because the path links between transmitters and receivers differ, and the incoming multipath signals cancel each other at the specific points where the signal levels are inverted. One technique for mitigating the effects of multipath fading in wireless channels is diversity. Diversity refers to a number of methods by which multiple copies of a signal that experience independent fading are provided to a receiver.
One form of diversity that has received considerable attention in recent years is transmit diversity. Transmit diversity uses multiple antennas to transmit copies of a signal to a receiver through several independent fading paths. The various known transmit diversity schemes involve different designs for the transmitted signals to enable the receiver to process the signals with a minimum of added complexity. Some systems introduce a new class of channel codes, known as space-time trellis codes, designed for multiple transmit antennas to provide both diversity and coding gain. The decoding complexity of these systems is comparable to that of existing trellis codes.
However, these and other types of transmit diversity methods are not applicable to an uplink of a cellular or other types of wireless systems because the size of mobile units typically precludes the use of multiple antennas. Previously proposed user cooperation methods also suffer from several shortcomings. First, they all involve some form of repetition which from a channel coding point of view may not be the best use of available bandwidth. Also, existing schemes either admit forwarding of erroneous estimates of a partner's symbols, or include propagation of a partner's noise. Error propagation diminishes the performance of transmissions, especially when the channel between partners is poor. Previous schemes also require that either the instantaneous bit error rate (BER) or signal-to-noise (SNR) of the channel between the partners be known at the base station for optimal maximum likelihood detection or decoding. In practice, it may be difficult to store sufficient information to reproduce the analog signal. Therefore, there has arisen a need for a cooperative transmission system and method that would be useful in cellular system environments and other similar types of environments.